Over the course of the past month, many in both the United States and the United Kingdom have drawn comparison between the 1996 shooting at Dunblane Primary School and the recent massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the aftermath of the tragedy at Dunblane, the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 and the Firearms (Amendment) (no 2) Act 1997 were both enacted, effectively banning the ownership of handguns in the United Kingdom.
The shooting at Dunblane and the subsequent legislation occurred in the wider context of the December 1995 murder of London headmaster Phillip Lawrence and the July 1996 attack at St Luke’s Primary School in Wolverhampton where nursery teacher Lisa Potts was severely wounded in a machete attack. The necessity of improving safety at Britain’s schools was therefore emphasised, even though Dunblane was by far the most deadly attack.
UK-based supporters of gun control in the United States, as well as prominent Brits in the United States such as Piers Morgan, have cited the fact that since Dunblane and the two firearms acts, there have been no school shootings in the United Kingdom. There has, of course, been a spate of stabbings of school-age children, notably in south London.
Even Fox News correspondent Greg Palkot was moved to remark that the parallels between Dunblane and Newtown were ‘striking’, even if his report focused on details such as the number of weapons used, the age of the victims and the suicide of the gunman.
The comparison between the two tragedies is compelling, but in the wider context of gun ownership in either country, has a rather superficial dimension. There have been three mass shootings in Great Britain in recent memory: the 1987 Hungerford shooting, Dunblane and the 2010 Cumbria shootings. Other high-profile gun crimes include those involving Michael Atherton in County Durham in 2008 and Raoul Moat in Northumbria in 2010. One could also look at several mass shootings in Northern Ireland over the course of the Northern Irish troubles.
Opponents of gun control could cite a report on politics.co.uk which suggests that following the 1997 acts, gun crime in the UK actually increased 40%. In particular, 2007 saw a wave of gang-related shootings, notably the murder of 11-year old schoolboy Rhys Jones in Liverpool. It continues to suggest that 2011 saw over 6,000 firearm offences in the United Kingdom. A Guardian report from 25 March 2011 on levels of gun ownership showed that there are in fact 1.8 million legally held guns in England and Wales. Furthermore, it provided indication of an increase in gun ownership since Dunblane. Important here, however, is the type of weapon owned; typically a shotgun rather than the handguns more common in the United States.
Figures for gun ownership in the United States fall into the category of ‘educated guess’. The FBI believes that there are around 200 million privately-held firearms. A CNN report in the aftermath of the 2012 shootings at a movie theatre in Colorado and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin suggested this figure was more than 50% higher. Another report from the same agency indicated that fewer Americans owned guns, but those who did owned more. There is a great deal of rhetorical evidence that gun sales have skyrocketed since the Sandy Hook shootings, ostensibly a result of fear among Americans that President Obama was likely to enact harsh gun control legislation.
In a press conference a week after the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, the National Rifle Association, which had acted with the utmost dignity in the preceding week, made the assertion that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun’. It proceeded to call for armed guards to be placed in all schools. There are around 125,000 schools in the United States.
In 1996 Columbine High School had an armed guard, although he was absent from campus on the day of the massacre. Whether or not the two gunmen could have known about this absence and what influence this had on their decision to commit their atrocity remains unclear. Furthermore, school shootings, as horrific as they are, are sufficiently rare as to make armed security guards superfluous to many. Some gun supporters have therefore suggested that teachers could be armed in classrooms. Their solution is that more guns mean less gun crime.
The United Kingdom example does not necessarily support or refute this assertion, and the statistics about gun ownership in the UK (the majority of legally held weapons are shotguns) betray an important cultural difference between the UK and the United States. Typically in the UK guns are owned for pest control or for sport. While a series of British journalists (most recently Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian) have suggested that Americans are in some way inextricably tied to the second amendment to the constitution, the reality is rather simpler. Most gun owners in the United States own a gun because they are afraid of criminals with guns.
Morgan, the controversial former newspaper editor, whose popularity in the United States baffles me at times, came up with perhaps the most reasonable solution to the gun issue in the United States. In a series of tweets, Morgan called for a blanket ban on all automatic weapons (although semi-automatic weapons are arguably more of a problem), no guns for anyone under 25 years of age, no guns for any criminals or people with mental health conditions, six-week-long background checks which include analysis of social media and an incentivised amnesty scheme to bring the maximum number of guns per household down to one. Significantly, some of these suggestions have formed the basis of vice-president Joe Biden’s recommendations, particularly in the realm of background checks.
Such an amnesty scheme worked in Australia where they had a massive buyback scheme in 1996 and 1997 following the Port Arthur massacre of the previous year. They have seen a substantial decrease in gun crime since, but claims that Australia has not had a mass shooting since are not entirely true: in 2002, two people were shot dead and five injured in a shooting at Monash University in Melbourne.
The issue is not the complete eradication of mass murder. The sad reality is that we all have to accept that we cannot do absolutely everything to prevent massacres occurring. What is important, however, is that we, as a global society, do something to make it as difficult as possible for someone to perpetrate such horrors. The facts from Dunblane and the relatively low-key issue of gun ownership in the UK beforehand suggest that a solution in the United States will be inherently more complicated.
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